New Tropico games aren’t appearing as quickly as my brain thinks. This is simply that I now perceive time at such a pace that the world is a dizzying blur around me. If you’d held a knifegun to my headthroat and demanded a release date for Tropico 4, I’d have tried to second-guess myself and suggested late 2012. It was in fact August 2011, and I am an old, confused man, unsure why the Christmasses won’t stop happening. Anyway, my confused rambling aside, Tropico 5 is appearing a very appropriate three years after the last time El Presidente reared his undemocratic city building head, and is now accepting applications for its March beta.

While I’ve always had a sort of uncomfortable reaction to the Tropico theme – chuckling it up to the notion of a despotic and cruel leader of an oppressed people – I also recognise that it’s a far more honest take on the reality of city building sims. Aren’t we always unelected leaders imposing our egocracy upon unaware masses? Isn’t SimCity actually the more sinister of the two, for all its deceitful pretence of an egalitarian society? Also, the phrase “banana republic” does make it sound like it’s a lot of fun.

So, you can sign up via this handy online form, to take part in the dynasty-adding new version of the series. Rather than just being one leader at one time, this time out El Pres kicks off in colonial times, and then your progeny replace you as the centuries go by. And you can make sure things stay in the family by promoting relations into positions of power! Just like a proper fucked up nation should.

A beta for this single-player series?, you ask impetuously. Indeed not, as this will also be the first Tropico game to introduce up to four-player cooperative and competitive multiplayer.

You’ll still be referred to as El Presidente, and him, and other things, that is it mostly. Not that it happens that often, but it bothered me a bit after a few hundred hours sunk into 3 and 4. More options for La Presidenta’s outfits would be nice as well, I suppose. After all, how are you supposed to impress Old Vicky (or whoever) so that she may grant freedom to the glorious island of Tropico?

To be fair, you can play the game as a nice leader, listening to your people, building what they want and getting elected fairly. In fact, in Tropico 4 I was sort of surprised how easy it is to stay in power without having to be underhand!

yeah. i always disliked the series because it looked from afar like a dumb, easy joke about something serious but actually playing trop 4 proved it to be a really smart, well-thought-out game. excited for 5

This is true, although the pendulum swung a little too far towards ‘nice leader’ in Tropico 4 in my opinion. Even on the harder maps, my people were oppressed for maybe half an hour, before having a difficult but fair life for maybe another hour or so, then it’s a life of luxury for everyone for the rest of time (that map).

In every iteration of the game since the first, it’s always been much easier to be a benevolent leader than a cruel one. Unfortunately, every iteration of the game has also just plain gotten easier, a trend I expect will continue with 5.

I was always put off the idea of Tropico by the El Presidente character. He looks like a nightmare vision from an American propaganda campaign, clearly being a hybrid of world’s most dangerous socialists Fidel Castro and Ricky Tomlinson.

But apparently they are actually good games, so maybe I should just bite the bullet and give them a chance.

I’m lovin’ every single morsel of it.
Having lived in non-aligned Movement country which (also) played the great Forces, and living today through lots of the major problems similar to bad game of Tropico – corruption, despotism of governing people, strikes, co-dependency on Great nations (well, nowadays, EU fonds mostly), I heartily appreciate satire and humor found in the games. It’s in the classic Simpsons tire, by it’s execution.
Fairly easy, once you learn the heart-beat of the economy, but nevertheless, loads of fun.

Tropico is pretty even handed. You can play a capitalist puppet dictator puppet, a communist puppet dictator, a megalomaniac dictator, or I suppose a competent elected civil servant. The actual story really does have the USSR and the US being total bastards and screwing your citizens at every opportunity to further their own ends. I would say it is actively critical of interventionist foreign policies, if you are really looking for a message.

All in all, I felt that 4 was a better game than 3, but not so much better that it justified a whole new game. I suppose they used a new engine and they updated the graphics (That is, they seem to have used higher-resolution versions of the textures they used in 3, and they added HDR color spaces), but beyond that, the new features felt more like what you’d get from a mid-aughts expansion pack. I told several of my friends that 4 was really good, but if they already had 3, to wait for a really good sale.

I think the game mechanics were really good, so I don’t want them to change up much of that. If anything, they need to make the user interface that shows the stats of your city a bit easier to manage, and it should provide more details.

The Tropico series is one of my favorite city builders. I really hope 5 gives me reason to throw money at it.

EDIT: Here’s hoping I can name one of my Presidentes Dirk Tator.

ANOTHER EDIT: I just saw the screenshots on their website. I really like what I see. Looks like there will be different styles of buildings available in different eras. Some of it looks a lot like Tropico 3 and 4, but some of it looks very, very different. Color me excited!

The fact that it goes back to the 19th century sounds really interesting.

Not sure if I dig the modern skyscrapers though, the modern times DLC for tropico 4 was completely out of place and misfit imo. I played with it once, saw the horrid buildings and the out of place sci-fi stuff, then started a new campagin with it disabled(thank god for the disable DLC option.)

I mean really, this doesn’t feel like a banana republic/tropico to me;

You can put me in the same boat as others who was put off a bit by this series’ marketing. I don’t even want to make it sound like it’s a big deal, because it’s not like I had some potent moral reaction against it or anything.

Then I bought Tropico 4 on a Steam sale and was very pleasantly surprised. I was trying to find a decent city-building game. The new Sim City was a no-go for obvious reasons, and I’d played SC4 to death already. My other options were, I guess, Cities XL (which I hear sucks) and Anno 2070 (I don’t plan on logging into my UPlay account ever again). Tropico 4 really hit the spot for me, and I guess I was fortunate as a newcomer since I couldn’t appreciate the the few changes between it and its previous entry.

“While I’ve always had a sort of uncomfortable reaction to the Tropico theme”

Or you can recognize this is a video game and not reality. Just like wolfenstein’s super nazis from retro future won’t harm your daily life, you won’t turn into an evil dictator because you mistreat little pixels. Othewise we should also condemn all the murder simulators, manshoots, GTA and mafia games, not to mention dungeon keeper (which encourages you to engage in the torture of innoncent creatures) and any other games which doesn’t comply with political correctness and acceptable morals.

Most video games have umcomfortable themes if you start going by that standard.